I’m diversifying my trading by adding swing trades to my index/commodities futures core positions. This will give me something to trade while I just sit in my large campaign traded positions. Small positions for now, until I figure this out. I’m playing breakouts, and looking for stocks that bob to the top (like a tennis ball underwater), while the market is pulling back. I’ll be using stops to get in and out, unless I happen to be watching it while it’s happening, where I will go discretionary (read probably screw something up). The stocks had to be outperforming the market going into the pullback too. It’s about momentum. My stop is about 1 hourly atr below my breakout trigger. I’m estimating the future atr and not programming any of it beyond bracketed stops to get in and out. Everything is a stop order on the mark. Profit taking will be done as follows: - if momentum up stops, dump everything - sell half after initial surge. About 3 days later. Could be more. - sell 25% after **close below 10 day ma - sell remainder after **close below 20 day ma I’ve selected 5 stocks during this pullback that I believe are waiting to breakout (I have about 30, but I’m only selecting what I believe are the 5 with the. It’s potential). They are my tennis balls. I’ll post the trades as they occur-ish. My expectation is about a 35% win rate, fwiw. the 5 waiting buy tiggers- SLCA SM SIG AGYS CPE
Hey treeman, which levels would you consider a breakout zone/price for SLCA & SM ? How fast you would close if the longs begins to fall ? Just trying to grasp your approach. Thanks & good luck.
I’ll hold onto the breakout levels for now. I can give my thinking as it runs. It’s almost guaranteed I’ll make changes to the numbers and method as I get more experience with this kind of trading. $10-15k buys for now while I have the training wheels on. Margin isn’t anywhere close to being in play. Just straight up. SLCA takes me back to 7/31 SM to may of last year, but that’s more coincidental to what’s going on right here in the near term. If it’s a breakout, it should hold an hourly atr to the downside. Otherwise I’m out. No moving of stops to keep the position. Either it breaks or I’m out after it falls below my initial stop mark(2-4% of purchase price). If the breakout can’t hold the hour of the breakout, is it a breakout? Can I do better than that? Absolutely. A confirming 5 min candle with volume would suffice, but that would require me to hawk the market. Which I won’t do. I’m not built that way. Pretty close to all of my trades are on mobile. And I seldomly open my laptop. That makes 5 min candles a challenge. On the plus side, my win rate should be higher by playing a higher timescale for a confirmed breakout. I will potentially re-enter on a stop out and re-setup. Most of the stocks I listed have >10% weekly atr, and >20% monthly atr. I’m good with a 2-4% stop- for now. I’m always open to feedback. I’ll post the filled orders (hopefully the day of) with a photo of the fills from my mobile app. If people want, they can research my time stamps for validity. Flexing a new muscle here. I’m not a huge fan of doing the individual ticker research, tbh. AGYS is a hell of a chart though.
A bit of a switch-up as I spent some time this weekend screening a bit more. Some of the above are still in (the first 3). I still like the others, I just like these better for now. It forced me to sit in front of my laptop, is what it did. CPE SLCA SM APPS CDXC EOLS GSM SAVA I've stepped the purchase shares down a bit, as getting the hang of this is more important to me right now. I also went to 8 tickers for the same reason. I have a lengthy ranked list after these 8 - the next 5 in the on-deck circle are (SPWR, NBR, AEGN , SIG, AVXL).
As in most other stocks, the uptrend started in Mar 2020. There were quite a few retracements for trend continuation. Will there be another retracement for trend continuation?
The outcome of these trades, other than me learning something and improving, are financially pretty inconsequential to me, at least at the moment. And unless it can do better than what I currently do (not likely), this is just something so that I don’t mess with my other stuff. Offensive defense. But I’m fairly confident in it. We will see. As for the overall market direction. I’m good there, thanks. I’m not taking outside input on that. You won’t see any darts or dartboards in this journal. And I don’t have much interest debating someone’s specific point of view on overall market direction. If someone thinks the put-call ratio is screaming market crash. Great. I don’t care what useless “facts” people bandy about. I don’t walk a wall of worry, I do my own homework. I’ll show the method and I’ll show the trades.
I’m on the west coast, so I don’t usually Wake up for the market open. SLCA was trigged within 5 min of open, which makes my stop further away than I wanted. Not a “breakout” per say se and it didn’t move much. If I get stopped out I’ll re-set this one up.
Code: Date Ticker Shares Open Close 3/1/2021 SLCA 1000 13.8436 13.2301 Realized P/L:-$613.50 3/1/2021 APPS 50 89.13 Unrealized P/L:$282.00